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Film is so axiomatically regarded as a visual medium that it’s easy to forget that sound came first. At least that was the order of things for Thomas Edison, who only invented the kinetograph so that people might be able to watch something while they listened to his phonograph. That factoid is at the heart of Midge Costin’s “Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound,” an erudite and impassioned documentary that does its damndest to prove that we experience movies with our ears as much as we do with our eyes — perhaps even more so.

This is a simple but righteous work of score-settling, made by someone with real skin in the game. Costin’s long career as a sound editor spans Hollywood features as disparate as “Hocus Pocus” and “Armageddon,” and the deep love she has for those who pioneered and appreciate her part of the filmmaking...

Wheeler Winston Dixon’s Cinema at the Margins is an enlightening collection of essays and interviews. Wearing his encyclopedic knowledge lightly, Dixon shares his expert insights and research in an eloquent, eminently readable style. I chose to review his new book because its reference to the ‘margins’ held the enticing promise of new discoveries, and a brief survey of its table of contents confirmed that, alongside well-known and much-loved names, there were also unfamiliar ones. The volume covers an early film by Peter Bogdanovich, the horror movies of Lucio Fulci, American 1930s and 40s science fiction serials, the TV series Dragnet, the brief career of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky and the long one of Hollywood director Sam Newfield, Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), U.S. 1960s experimental cinema, Dixon’s own meditation on the shift to digital, and interviews with music video director Dale “Rage” Resteghini,...

Film director whose work included the wartime masterpiece Western Approaches

The director Pat Jackson, who has died aged 95, was best known for the semi-documentary war film Western Approaches (1944). This neglected classic – a feature-length portrait of the Battle of the Atlantic – was shot under the auspices of the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit and predominantly filmed at sea under hazardous conditions. The shoot's logistical nightmares were compounded by the vast size of the Technicolor camera. Jackson himself devised the story of the imminent convergence of a German U-boat and an English ship which is on the way to save a group of comrades in a lifeboat.

Jackson was in his late 20s when he shot Western Approaches with the outstanding cameraman Jack Cardiff and a cast of amateur actors. It was a remarkable achievement that remained unsurpassed throughout the writer-director's lengthy career. The film was well received in Britain and...

Leave it to the British to invent the cult television show. The Prisoner is the very definition of such sensations that have come to represent so much of TV-dvd collecting. Running seventeen episodes, it was a show I first found on PBS on Saturday nights while waiting for Saturday Night Live, and then once I entered High School was steered to it by friends as the local library had all the episodes on tape in the old, puffy clam-shell boxes. Later, a friend left me all his tapes to hold on to as he moved around the country, reclaiming them a year or two later. Then came the DVD box set, and now the Blu-ray edition. My review of The Prisoner after the jump.

Patrick McGoohan stars as Number 6, a secret agent (and this appears to make the show a semi-sequel to his previous series Danger Man) who resigns, and...

Year: 2009

Directors: Patrick McGoohan / Pat Jackson / Don Chaffey / David Tomblin

Writers: Patrick McGoohan / David Tomblin / Anthony Skene / Terence Feely

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Amazon: link

Review by: agentorange

Series Rating: 9 out of 10

DVD Rating: 7 out of 10

In episode six of the 1968 version of The Prisoner, our hero, Number 6, wakes up to find "the Village" completely deserted. No cheery "good morning" greets him from the shrill local radio girl. No running water awaits him for his shower and shave and no other prisoners are out walking the streets. "This is it," we think. This is his chance to make a get away.

For the next 30 minutes (a lifetime in TV terms) we watch a dead-silent Six plan and execute an elaborate, daring and sometimes dangerous escape. Not one word is uttered, yet we're completely riveted. We know what's coming. We know Six will get the rug pulled out from under him...

Chicago – Patrick McGoohan was ready to quit. After playing secret agent John Drake in over eighty episodes of the British TV show “Danger Man” (known in the Us as “Secret Agent”), McGoohan was clearly in need of a change. Luckily, his script editor George Markstein had a great idea up his sleeve. What if Drake suddenly resigned, and his employers wouldn’t let him go? What if they kidnapped Drake and sent him to a secret location where he couldn’t escape? Markstein was clearly inspired by the actual incidents during WWII where people were incarcerated and under constant surveillance in resort-like prisons. McGoohan loved the idea, and together they created one of the most astoundingly original and richly entertaining programs in television history in “The Prisoner,” recently released on Blu-Ray to coincide with the AMC remake starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

“The Prisoner” debuted in...